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It's weird how DP product announcements are almost uniformly a massive let down.

This is a budget model, after all.

It has 3.8 gb total PCM memory. 2.8 gb is for the piano, and since it is still unstretched and unlooped, the only way I can think of for them to have reduced its footprint from the Kronos' 4.7 would be to cut the # of vel layers.

IMO, the best thing about the Kronos was the semi modeled EP engine. Too bad it isn't making it over. Hopefully an SV2 will retain the EP engine of the Kronos.

Yes, the more I learn about the Krome, the more I still see a market for an SV2, with the full 8-layer pianos and the full EP modeling. (Maybe the CX3 engine too.)

Originally Posted By: Hideki Matsui

The Kronos turned out to be a big POS for me.

What I'm finding most intriguing about it at the moment is the 2.0 OS that allows you to load your own streaming samples. Someone in another forum has already loaded a couple of Ivory pianos onto it. Interesting possibilities.

The original Rhodes and Wurli pianos were mono (sometimes with stereo fx), so it's a safe bet the samples are mono. So assuming the rest of your math is right, that's 3.2 seconds per sample. That's not bad, I think.

I think you need at least 30 seconds average before it's anywhere near right (solo recording quality). Too bad no one has attempted MP3 or similar compression instead of the wholesale violence of looping / stretching / limited velocity layers.

Originally Posted By: anotherscott

The original Rhodes and Wurli pianos were mono (sometimes with stereo fx), so it's a safe bet the samples are mono. So assuming the rest of your math is right, that's 3.2 seconds per sample. That's not bad, I think.

Don't you also have to take into account the damper resonance samples, the sympathetic resonance samples, the key-off samples etc.? 20 layers might actually result in 30-100 samples per note.

From the Synthology site:

Quote:

With a 49GB library, Ivory II American Concert D is the largest single piano in the Ivory family. This American Steinway possesses a naturally long sustain, which is captured in its entirety to the final decay, some of the notes ringing longer than two minutes. Also included are up to 20 velocity levels, with more soft pedal samples, and more release samples to capture more detail than any Ivory instrument before.

Ivory II American Concert D is powered by the award-winning Ivory II engine, and contains the full compliment of Ivory II’s features, foremost being our acclaimed Harmonic Resonance Modeling for the realization of true Sympathetic String Resonance. Custom designed by Synthogy DSP guru, George Taylor, this technology does not rely upon triggering additional samples or use ordinary sine waves. Rather, notes struck that are harmonically related excite the actual complex overtones of the notes that are being held, in the same manner that undamped strings resonate in a real acoustic piano. Together with the new American Concert D samples, the results are simply stunning, the culmination of Synthogy’s most powerful technology, with our most advanced sampling techniques.

Key off samples are generally quite short, but yes that kind of thing would add a bit to the overall sample set size. From the above it seems they don't rely on raw samples per se in order to do the sympathetic resonance - which is quite interesting. They do have separate soft pedal samples, and that would definitely cut into the per note sample time somewhat. They claim to sample all the way out to silence, something I think you can do with ~50 seconds of time per sample (on average) - the very lowest notes might take ~2 minutes, the highest ~10 seconds.

I sure wish we were talking about a DP with this kind of sample set rather than software. Korg's idea of "lavish" is 600MB for 3 EPs - perhaps just a poor translation from the Japanese? At 200 MB per EP that's ~250 times smaller than the Ivory II piano! It's a step in the right direction, but even their largest AP sample sets are ~10 times smaller than Ivory II.

It's like finding only Razor scooters in the "Interplanetary Rocket Ship" product category at Amazon.

Korg's idea of "lavish" is 600MB for 3 EPs - perhaps just a poor translation from the Japanese? At 200 MB per EP that's ~250 times smaller than the Ivory II piano! It's a step in the right direction, but even their largest AP sample sets are ~10 times smaller than Ivory II.

They are lavish compared to any amount of piano/EP samples ever in a $999 (61 key) or $1599 (88 key) workstation (or, for that matter, probably any self-contained keyboard ever made, except for the Kronos and maybe some of the libraries available for the Motif XF).

Yamaha MOX is a bit more expensive, and has 355 mb of PCM samples total.

Krome predecessor, the M50, has 256 mb of PCM samples total.

By these standards, 200 mb for a single EP or 2.8 gigs for a single piano in a board in the Krome price range is lavish.

But you know all this. ;-)

It is dirt cheap for Ivory to use huge samples because they are running on cheap commodity hardware and OS (plus their own product has a manufacturing cost of virtually zero). Yet you still can't put together a portable Ivory based system with Krome's features for the price of a Krome, even if you are wiling to deal with the trade-offs of using a computer based system.

What I'm finding most intriguing about it at the moment is the 2.0 OS that allows you to load your own streaming samples. Someone in another forum has already loaded a couple of Ivory pianos onto it. Interesting possibilities.

I am unable to find anything which confirms that capability. Do you have a link for this ?

To be clear, I'm not saying you can load Ivory into the Kronos, you can't. But if you have Ivory running on your computer, there are tools that will allow you to sample it and create basically your own scaled-down version that you can load into your Kronos. It will give you a piano of similar character, but no, you're not going to get the 18 layers, advanced resonance features, etc. of the original.

To be clear, I'm not saying you can load Ivory into the Kronos, you can't. But if you have Ivory running on your computer, there are tools that will allow you to sample it and create basically your own scaled-down version that you can load into your Kronos. It will give you a piano of similar character, but no, you're not going to get the 18 layers, advanced resonance features, etc. of the original.

Oh, that is it, Wow ... You had me all excited.

Wouldn't the native sound of the DP have to be pretty bad for you to want a watered down version of another product instead ?

Wouldn't the native sound of the DP have to be pretty bad for you to want a watered down version of another product instead ?

Not at all. Even a very good piano sound can be surpassed, and even a "watered down" 49 gb piano should be able to give you some darn nice results, and it wouldn't mean the standard piano sounds are necessarily bad.

Also, there's just the matter of personal taste, preferring the character of a different sound. After all, people can prefer a Steinway grand over a Yamaha grand (or even over another Steinway) without either one being considered "pretty bad," right?

You know i have this vision of a digital keyboard controller that has a built in docking station for a ultrabook, basically on the center top of the board where most of the controls are usually located on today's DP's. you would flip up the display and it would become the brains of the keyboard. It would obviously be able to handle huge sample programs, and would somehow negate all the cables etc. An additional feature would be the ability to slide in/remove a light weight action for gigging, and a real piano action for studio/home use.

The exception to what I said above about "any self-contained keyboard ever made" is a board that I occasionally forget about, the Crumar Baby Grand Pro. I'd love to hear of some first-hand experiences with that one. It's not quite what bfb wants, but it's kind of along those lines... essentially a controller tied to a self-contained embedded Windows system (which should be more solidly reliable than a laptop approach), into which you can load your choice of high quality VST software pianos.

It seems to me like it would be the most stable and most ergonomically convenient way to get the best piano sound in a live environment. At 44 pounds and $2979 (plus the cost of the VST you select), the weight and price seem to be very competitive. If all you care about is a piano sound, it seems like that would compare very favorably to, say, a Nord Piano, a Roland RD-700NX, Yamaha CP5, or Kawai MP10.

Allow me to educate you a little there. In all likelyhood, you meant 49 GB.

Because there is no such thing as "gb". But there is "GB". G is giga, which means billion, or actually 1024x1024x1024 in this context. "B" is byte(s).

By the way, "mb" has a meaning, which is millibits. But since you can't subdivide a bit, mb is completely bogus. So whenever I see that, I have to assume you mean either "Mb" or "MB". An MB is eight times as much as an Mb. So it's still very ambiguous.

yes, like many on the net, I'm not always so attentive to capitalization. ;-)

Oh, but you are. You even write "VST" instead of "vst". If you weren't, I wouldn't bother posting what I did. Some people demonstratively avoid capitalizing the first word in each sentenze, even though they correctly capitalize everything else. It's much slower to read text like that, because your brain stumbles a bit every time it sees that unconvential capitalization. At least my brain does. Every time I see "gb" I go "WTF, that doesn't make sense" for half a second, then I continue reading.

Originally Posted By: anotherscott

However, since, as you say, there is no such thing as "gb" at least the potential for ambiguity was minimal!

I'll just start calling you scottbutnotthatonetheother then, as the potential for ambiguity is minimal!

Allow me to educate you a little there. In all likelyhood, you meant 49 GB.

Because there is no such thing as "gb". But there is "GB". G is giga, which means billion, or actually 1024x1024x1024 in this context. "B" is byte(s).

By the way, "mb" has a meaning, which is millibits. But since you can't subdivide a bit, mb is completely bogus. So whenever I see that, I have to assume you mean either "Mb" or "MB". An MB is eight times as much as an Mb. So it's still very ambiguous.

yes, like many on the net, I'm not always so attentive to capitalization. ;-)

Oh, but you are.

I'm usually pretty attentive to that stuff, but I assure you, I get lazy sometimes. ;-)

In the old days, I do remember that confusion would occur between kilobits and kilobytes, both of which were in common use. In the context of sound samples, I don't think anyone ever talks about gigabits, so I doubt I really caused any confusion, but I'll try to remember to always capitalize GB!

Allow me to educate you a little there. In all likelyhood, you meant 49 GB.

Because there is no such thing as "gb". But there is "GB". G is giga, which means billion, or actually 1024x1024x1024 in this context. "B" is byte(s).

By the way, "mb" has a meaning, which is millibits. But since you can't subdivide a bit, mb is completely bogus. So whenever I see that, I have to assume you mean either "Mb" or "MB". An MB is eight times as much as an Mb. So it's still very ambiguous.

That's all, thanks for your attention

Hey Sheldon Cooper, welcome to Piano World!

Haha, I was thinking the same thing!

Torhu, you'd better be some sort of genius if you are going to go around quibbling over things like that.

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"I'm still an idiot and I'm still in love" - Blue Sofa - The Plugz 1981 (Tito Larriva) Disclosure : I am professionally associated with Arturia but my sentiments are my own only.